Accredited with 1 CPD hour by the Solicitors Regulation Authority and the Bar Standards Board

About this lecture:

The past decade has seen a notable evolution in the normative context for law’s response to people with impaired capacity. Driven by a range of factors, including greater recognition of human rights (perhaps most notably through the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities) and better empirical understandings, a rhetoric of inclusion and empowerment has replaced traditional approaches centred on control and protection. Law reform projects in various jurisdictions (Australia, Canada, Ireland, Northern Ireland) have attempted to develop legislative frameworks to give effect to these emerging norms. Yet there is also another narrative. Concerns are expressed (perhaps most commonly by frontline professionals: healthcare professionals, lawyers, social workers and sometimes by family members of people with impaired capacity) that something important may be lost where there is a devaluation of protective norms. There is also a dissonance between the abstract ideals of human rights on the one hand and on the other, the complex corporeal, economic, family, phenomenological and social context within which people with impaired capacity, and those who care for/about them, live.

Tensions between empowerment and protection norms and between abstract, rights-based and contextual, evidence-based policy drivers are inevitable by-products of law’s evolution and they play a necessary role in the development of the law in this area. Rebalancing is a process and not a once-off event. And, of course, as revealed by even a minimal consideration of earlier legal responses to impaired capacity, there is a good deal of room for evolutionary wrong-turns and for unexpected and undesirable consequences. Placing current debates about how law should respond to impaired capacity within an evolutionary context, this paper identifies and evaluates the range of ways in which contemporary tensions may be resolved.

About the speaker:

Mary Donnelly is a Professor in the Law School, University College Cork. Her books include Consent: Bridging the Gap Between Doctor and Patient (Cork: Cork University Press, 2002); Healthcare Decision-Making and the Law: Autonomy, Capacity and the Limits of Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) and The Law of Credit and Security (Dublin: Round Hall Thomson Reuters, 2011; 2nd ed, 2015) and she is co-author of End-of-Life Care: Ethics and Law (Cork University Press, 2011) andConsumer Law: Rights and Regulation (Dublin: Round Hall Thomson Reuters, 2014) and co-editor ofEthical and Legal Debates in Irish Healthcare: Confronting Complexities (Manchester University Press, 2016).

She has collaborated on projects funded by the European Commission, the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, the National Children’s Office and the Irish Hospice Foundation and has acted as consultant for public agencies and legal firms. She is/has been a member of the Expert Group to review the Mental Health Act 2001 and of the HSE National Consent Advisory Group and the HSE National Assisted Decision Making Steering Group.

Thursday, December 8, 2016 at 6:00 PM (GMT)

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